Creating a truly smart Indian city

India is on the threshold of creating a hundred ‘smart cities’. It is pertinent, therefore, at this point of time, to take look at the question: What, after all, is a ‘smart city’?

Before trying to answer this question, we need to analyse the basic characteristics of a city.

What makes a city? Let us first look at the birth and growth pattern of a city. A city is like a living body. Like a group of cells coming together to form a human body, a group of people come together to form a city. A city, as in the case of the human body, is born, must grow to its limit, cease to grow and eventually perish. In the context of such an axiomatic truth, let us now determine how the physical form of a city should be.

A city, which is a collection of settlements that are conceptually radial (not necessarily radial in pattern), presents an interesting option. The centre of each of such settlements, its hub (nucleus), will consist of public amenities such as the city hall, shopping malls and entertainment centres, and public parks, interspersed with open spaces.

The first ring (belt) around that would consist of the various centres of administration. Educational institutions and training centres will comprise the next ring. The ring outside of that will consist of residential buildings followed by a green belt. This will be followed by the ring that consists of manufacturing centres. The last ring will comprise of vast farmlands. The rings between the city centre and the last ring will be interspersed with small-scale commercial establishments and basic public amenities creating a mixed development pattern within them. I call this human settlement a ‘Multi-centric Radial City’.

Growth and death What is wrong with present-day Indian cities? Fundamentally, it is unlimited growth, the bane of many present-day cities, that destroys their order beyond repair. In a human body, unlimited growth is considered cancerous. The city is no exception to this rule of common sense.

A city can function to the peak of its efficiency only for a limited period of time after which it should be allowed to die a natural death. Adding newer and newer parts to an old city, like transplanting new organs into the body of an old living organism and prolonging its life, distorts its fundamental body mechanism.

Any city must be designed for a limited number of people. As and when the limit is attained, newer cities should be designed and built. This should be a continuous process. This is quite similar to the situation of a living being, on achieving maturity, allowing the newer generation to come into existence through the method of reproduction.

All major cities in India, such as Mumbai and Delhi, are resorting to desperate measures to reduce traffic congestion. Metro rail services, to ferry people from the suburb to the city, are being planned and implemented. A number of flyovers are being built. Streets are being widened, sacrificing big trees adjoining the walkway. The landscaped walkways and medians are getting thinner and thinner. These are measures that are supposed to solve the problems. What we are forgetting is that these problems need not arise at all in the first place. Instead of trying to solve the problems, our efforts should be directed to making sure the problems are not created in the first place.

About ‘smart cities’ That the term ‘smart cities’ refers to an urban agglomeration featured by skyscrapers, glazed and isolated with huge areas of landscape created around each of them, is an incorrect notion. In such a condition, each such tower will stand so isolated that the people who live in one would hardly have any contact, much less any interaction, with the occupants of the adjacent towers.

In such an environment, it may even be hard to find pedestrians, since the occupants would be parking their vehicles in the basements and going to their respective workplaces or homes using elevators. In such a context, even the street level interaction among residents would become a rare happening. This situation of retrograde social isolation will perhaps be complete when ‘food courts’ and ‘shopping centres’ are also provided within those very ‘modern’ skyscrapers.

Studies have indicated that such isolation among the inhabitants of such isolated ‘skyscraper cities’ has even led to an enhanced degree of estrangement among their inhabitants, leading to a spurt in incidents of psychic traumas and suicides. Contrast this with cities where citizens routinely frequent the landscaped city squares, plazas and streetside eateries, and settle down for a neighbourly chat on stone benches in nooks and corners.

This takes us back to the all-important question we started with: What is a smart Indian city?

In an ideal world An ideal Indian city should have buildings and outdoor spaces that respect the macro, micro climatic and local terrain conditions and cultural sensibilities that are very unique to India. This is one area where city planners, especially if they are foreigners who have no idea about Indian conditions, can go terribly wrong. For example, Chandigarh, a city designed by Le Corbusier, has a rigid geometric grid pattern for the city plan and a configuration based on zoning, both misfits in the Indian context.

India is blessed with climatic conditions that allow open planning. In that sense, a city full of air-conditioned buildings that are completely sealed with glass and aluminium panels all around, can hardly be termed ‘smart’. In fact, a city like that will be the anti-thesis of ‘smart’. A city where every building is competing with every other building in height, or, a city that is divided into blocks where each block is a building by itself, like in the case of a typical American city, I believe, can hardly be termed ‘smart’.

Prudent use of material, time and energy in building and sustaining a city’s buildings is also of paramount importance. By merging the planning principles, and environmental and ecofriendly construction methods outlined, we can create what I call responsible cities.

Those cities, when created, will actually be smarter than the so-called smart cities.

The writer is an urban planner and the MD of IDEA Centre Architects, Bengaluru

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